Jane’s Walk NYC & London Present: The Walker with Author Matthew Beaumont

Join the Jane’s Walk NYC and Jane’s Walk London team as we join forces from across the pond to host a conversation with author Matthew Beaumont about his recent book, The Walker: on Losing and Finding Yourself in a Modern City. In addition to discussing themes in Mr. Beaumont’s book, the Jane’s Walk audience will share about observations in their neighborhoods. We are asking all attendees to have their “eyes on the street” and go on a walk in their area prior to the program, capturing a single photo of their wandering. Try going on a route less often taken. What do you notice? Photos will be collected in this Google Jam Board to create a collage of walk observations that will be discussed!

This event will be hosted on Zoom meeting. We recommend that all who RSVP arrive promptly as capacity is limited and the event may be oversubscribed.

About The Walker: On Losing and Finding Yourself in a Modern City

A literary history of walking from Dickens to Žižek

There is no such thing as a false step. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Especially if we are going nowhere. Moving around the modern city is not a way of getting from A to B, but of understanding who and where we are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces episodes in the history of the walker since the mid-nineteenth century.

From Dickens’s insomniac night rambles to restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and self-escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life.

Through these writings, Beaumont asks: Can you get lost in a crowd? What are the consequences of using your smartphone in the street? What differentiates the nocturnal metropolis from the city of daylight? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? And can we save the city – or ourselves – by taking to the pavement?